This is an excellent comment. I think the answer is just that the cloud provider API's are getting more "stable" and user friendly with time, making the additional abstractions of e.g. terraform not worth the overhead of learning that entire world. The response from the Pulumi co-founder seems to indicate as such, that they're relying on the simplicity of the API's to not get into a bad state (although I'm still skeptical if that's possible).